All Resources

Journal Article

Science Conversations for Young Learners

What do you get when you add 20 kindergarten students and a student-led science discussion for the first time? Mass chaos! So, after taking some time to recover, the authors began to reflect on what they could change to help orchestrate quality scien...

Journal Article

Creating a Schoolyard Mini-Garden

The creation of schoolyard gardens is a growing movement in the United States and around the world (Ballard, Tong, and Usher 1998; Pope 1998; Lewis 2004). It brings together all of the features of authentic hands-on science: Students can collect data...

Journal Article

The Interdisciplinary Study of Biofuels

From media news coverage to fluctuating gas prices, the topic of energy is hard to ignore. However, little connection often exists between energy use in our daily lives and the presentation of energy-related concepts in the science classroom. The con...

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: Plants and Their Partners

Plants are a ubiquitous piece of the elementary science curriculum. By the time they reach middle school, students have often grown enough bean seeds to feed a small city. Often these lessons don’t “grow” deeper ideas from the basic observation...

Journal Article

Instant Integration: Just Add Water

An instructional unit incorporating some of the Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) hydrology protocols provides an excellent way to connect academic learning, scientific inquiry, multiple subjects, and the values requi...

Journal Article

Tread Lightly: The Truth About Science Friction

During a recent unit on characteristics of animals in different environments, “backyard safari” trips around the schoolyard provided opportunities for students to describe ways that animals are adapted to their unique environments. This led to a ...

Journal Article

Methods and Strategies: Being Deliberate About Concept Development

In order to move students’ thinking from the exploration experiences to concept understanding (and thus the ability to then apply that understanding), teachers must deliberately consider students’ misconceptions, the intermediate steps to the acc...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: The Great Fakesperiment

The Great Fakesperiment is based on 10 fictitious experiment examples. These examples included a brief description of what the experiment was about, asked students to identify the independent or dependent variable, and listed possible answers. The ac...

Acquired Book

Chemistry With Charisma – Volume 1 – 24 Lessons That Capture & Keep Attention in the Classroom

How can a whoopee cushion inspire students’ enthusiasm for learning chemistry? With this powerful book, you will learn to use whoopee cushions—and many other fun items—to capture (and keep) attention in your classroom! Meaningful, motivating, a...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Conceptualizing Moon Phases—Helping students learn how to learn

Helping students understand how to learn is an important goal for all subjects and levels of education. While this goal is highly regarded, promoting it is extremely difficult. Many times, we as teachers are consumed with how to better help our stude...

Journal Article

Research and Teaching: Students’ Perceptions of Their Grades Throughout an Introductory Biology Course—Effect of Open-Book Testing

In this study, the authors examined students’ perceptions of their grades throughout an introductory biology course. Since large majorities of students prefer open-book exams (Moore and Jensen 2008); they sought to determine how these exams affect ...

Journal Article

Extracting the Max From a DNA Extraction

Students of all ages get a thrill out of actually seeing clumps or strands of DNA. The Biotechnology/Bioinformatics Discovery! Project, a professional development workshop offered to science teachers, has always included a DNA-extraction activity. Ov...

Journal Article

Society for College Science Teachers: “But, I Thought We Were Colleagues?” Professors Evaluating Professors

Isn’t forcing faculty to serve as evaluators of peers a lot to expect? To assign tenured professors to evaluate their colleagues is also not fair when the work is nerve racking, the time is demanding, and the stakes are high. Faculty evaluations ar...

Journal Article

From Aristotle to Today: Making the History and Nature of Science Relevant

Students connect to science in multiple ways. For some students, learning how real people have developed and defended their scientific ideas makes science relevant and interesting. Tracking the changes in scientific thought over time can be fascinati...

Journal Article

An Undergraduate Journal Club Experience: A Lesson In Critical Thinking

In an effort to better prepare undergraduate students to read and critically evaluate scientific literature, a journal club experience was introduced into a university's bachelor of science curriculum. As a result of this experience, students have be...

Journal Article

Career of the Month: Avalanche Researcher

Many of us enjoy snowboarding, snowshoeing, and other winter sports at the season’s first sign of snow. But what about when a massive amount of snow crashes down the mountain, gains speed and size with every second, buries everything in its path, a...

Journal Article

Green Science: Going locavore—Teaching students about the benefits of food produced locally

A term that is fairly new to the English vernacular is locavore. This term describes anyone who eats food that is grown locally. A locavore diet consists of both perishable and imperishable food that is generally produced within a 100-mile radius of ...

Journal Article

Editor’s Corner: Today’s Polar Science

The Earth’s polar regions once seemed a remote realm, accessible only through the compelling tales of intrepid explorer-scientists. Accounts of these polar explorers have long fascinated our imagination. Today, Earth’s polar regions are perhaps m...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Seeing the world in a garden—Science and art curricula synergy

Duke Farms and Gardens, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough, New Jersey, that includes a large greenhouse, was the site of a middle school field trip that provided the opportunity to highlight overlapping science and visual art curricula goals. Some...

Journal Article

Teaching With Web-Based Videos

Today, the use of web-based videos in science classrooms is becoming more and more commonplace. However, these videos are often fast-paced and information rich—science concepts can be fragmented and embedded within larger cultural issues. This arti...

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: Record Keeping in Science

Records show others what data you have collected and under what conditions. Without records, patterns escape notice. Records also provide accountability and allow someone else to replicate or analyze your methods. Record keeping is fundamental to sci...

Journal Article

Just Like Real Scientists

How do you inspire students to keep records like scientists? Share the primary research of real scientists and explicitly teach students how to keep records—that’s how! Therefore, a group of third-grade students and their teacher studied the work...

Journal Article

Teacher’s Toolkit: How do you know if they’re getting it? Writing assessment items that reveal student understanding

Through a project funded by the National Science Foundation, Horizon Research has been developing assessment items for students (in the process, compiling item-writing principles from several sources and adding their own). In this article, the author...

Journal Article

Editorial: Gooey-Gosh

Today, the majority of the leadership among science educators of all levels recognizes that inquiry learning is necessary to build this basis for everyone. Lectures on the dry facts of nomenclature can’t compete with the effectiveness of a well-con...

Journal Article

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! Digital cameras, young inquisitive scientists, give it a try! In this project, students create an open-ended question for investigation, capture and record their observations—data—with digital cameras, and create ...

Journal Article

Analysis of Students’ Downloading of Online Audio Lecture Recordings in a Large Biology Lecture Course

This paper address three questions apropos of those posed by Kadel (2006) in the context of a large introductory-level undergraduate science lecture course. These questions include how podcasting is used by professors and students, whether podcastin...

Journal Article

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA)

By studying Antarctica via satellite and through ground-truthing research, we can learn where the ice is melting and why. The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA), a new and cutting-edge way for scientists, researchers, educators, students, and ...

Journal Article

The Learning-Focused Transformation of Biology and Physics Core Courses at the U.S. Air Force Academy

An institution-wide focus on deep learning has made significant changes in the biology and physics core course curriculum at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The biology course director has reworked course objectives to reflect the learning-focused approa...

Journal Article

The Prepared Practitioner: Understanding Heat and Temperature

Since this issue of The Science Teacher has a polar theme, the author thought this would be a particularly appropriate time to examine research about students’ preconceived ideas about heat—or the lack thereof. Heat and temperature are difficult,...

Journal Article

Idea Bank: Celebrate the International Year of Astronomy

In 1609, Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the night sky and began a series of observations of the cosmos. These observations, together with the work of Johannes Kepler and other scientists of the time, revolutionized our understanding of the u...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Exploratory Excursions—Documenting slow changes in local parks

While hiking a local conservation property and trying to unwind after a hectic day, it dawned on the author that teaching his students about slow changes to the Earth’s surface could be as simple as a walk in the woods. Decaying stumps, ATV tracks,...

Journal Article

How Does Mechanical Weathering Change Rocks? Using Reading-to-Learn Strategies to Teach Science Content

Many teachers fall into the pattern of “assumptive teaching” (Herber 1970), assuming that other instructors will teach students the important strategies they need for learning. In this case, tools and strategies may not be taught outside of readi...

Journal Article

Practitioner Research Success!

Practitioner research is an ongoing, reflective process in which inservice teachers (i.e., practitioners) ask questions about their day-to-day teaching practice, develop plans of action to investigate these questions, draw conclusions supported by ev...